Posted by: travadmin on Mar 29, 2004 – 11:04 AM
exoticlocations You know that dream you have, where you trade in your 9-to-5 job for life on some exotic, secluded island? Be careful what you wish for.
GREEN TURTLE CAY, Abaco, Bahamas – I am going to start with the bugs, because, whatever anyone dreams of when they imagine running away to live on an island paradise, bugs rarely enter the picture.
Sun, yes. Sand, of course. Endless rounds of rum punch, very possibly.
But when we moved from Fort Worth to the Bahamas last May, what really affected our day-to-day life, what stood out, what defined our reality?
Bugs.
Mosquitoes. Termites. No-see-ums — nasty, stealth, mosquitolike creatures that were capable of slipping through the mosquito net we draped over the baby’s crib. We had doctor flies, spiders, beetles, hornets, roaches. And we had ants, lots and lots of ants.
Within days of our arrival, I began to find ants everywhere in our tiny two-bedroom cottage: crawling on my toothbrush, inside a tin of Altoids, on my husband’s glasses, and — yes — in our pants. When I found some inside a never-been-opened box of sugar, I knew it was time to get help.
So I cornered a couple of locals, who, with indifference, informed me that there were no exterminators on the island.
Local No. 1: “Most people just learn to live with ’em.”
Local No. 2: “It’s not so bad once you get used to it.”
Almost a year later, when someone asks me about living in the Bahamas, this is the conversation I remember. Because, sure, they were talking about the ants. But they were really describing the way I came to feel about our new tropical home.
Everybody thinks they want to run away to paradise. No phones, no lights, no motor cars; not a single luxury, except white sand, palm trees and a lifestyle with a lot less stress.
So last May, we did it. We quit our jobs, sold our house and cars, put our stuff in storage, packed up the dog and the baby and moved to a remote island in the Bahamas, where my husband, Glenn, took a job as the executive chef at a small resort and marina.
From the pictures — and, yes, I agreed to move there sight unseen — it looked perfect. Tropical flowers; wide, white beach; clear, blue-green water; no McDonald’s or Wal-Marts; and, best of all, a little, yellow cottage to live in, just steps from the water. It would be a great place, we thought, to live and work and raise our 8-month-old son.
The island we settled on is called Green Turtle Cay, part of the sparsely populated Abacos chain. It is so small that even I, a former travel writer, had only vaguely heard of it. Green Turtle is a tiny piece of rock just three miles long, maybe half a mile wide. It has 500 residents, three hotels, one town with a bank, a post office and three tiny grocery stores the size of your average 7-Eleven. There’s not much to do but soak up the sun. The fishing and the snorkeling were reported to be excellent, the island vibe was laid-back and the weather practically perfect — 85 degrees and sunny virtually year-round.
There were a few things we worried about. Like reports that milk cost $8 a gallon. And hurricanes. And the fact that to buy anything beyond the basics, we’d have to take a ferry, then a 40-minute car ride to get it. But we brushed aside those minor anxieties.
Besides, it wasn’t like we were moving to, say, Yap (a possibility at one point in our overseas job search, despite the fact we’re still not sure where Yap is). Green Turtle was beautiful, it was safe, it had high-speed Internet and satellite TV. And it was only 150 miles off the coast of Florida.
If only we’d known then what we know now.
Things I wish I had understood before moving to the Bahamas, Part 1: We may be living at a resort, but that is not the same as vacationing here.
We arrived on May 13 and immediately moved into a cottage on the grounds of the resort. We fell in love with the view from the screened porch — the bay and its marina, where million-dollar yachts often anchored — and the landscaping, lush with coral-flowered hibiscus and coconut palms. And you couldn’t beat the location, just up the hill from the restaurant and 30 steps from the pool. People paid $200 a night to stay here, and we were getting it for free — part of the deal that had allowed us to come here despite taking a 75 percent pay cut. On nights that the popular local band the Gully Roosters played on the restaurant’s patio, I could hear every song as clearly as if I were sitting at the bar drinking a Tipsy Turtle, the resort’s signature rum punch.
Caption: Glenn, Enzo and Patricia Rodriguez Terrell on their boat about two months after arriving on the island.
Of course, in our initial excitement, we conveniently overlooked a few shortcomings. For instance, that the cottage was furnished with ratty, mismatched castoffs from the hotel. (Think of the stuff you had in your first apartment, except worse.) There were also several large holes in the floor, but, we thought, someone would surely come by to fix them soon.
More important, we’d forgotten that we weren’t there to sip Tipsy Turtles. While the guests paid for the privilege of sleeping late, swimming and snorkeling all day and eating big lobster dinners, we had merely transferred our routine to a new, more exotic location. We still had to do laundry, clean the bathroom (daily maid service, unfortunately, didn’t extend to our place) and make dinner, plus perform the occasional task we hadn’t had in Fort Worth, such as kill the occasional mouse. (Those floor holes, which we eventually fixed ourselves, were like a perennial welcome mat for the mice that lived, and occasionally died, under the house.)
One could hardly blame the mice; they’d long since taken the place over. We’d been told the cottage had been unoccupied for “a while,” which turned out to have been 10 years.
Lots of things were like that: We had only heard part of the story before we got here.
Take hurricanes. The story: We’d been told they weren’t much of a problem, that they rarely hit here and that there were civil defense plans in place.
The reality: Everybody talked about nothing else when even the slightest tropical depression formed in the Atlantic. A huge one had almost taken out the whole island four years ago. And the civil defense plans? People laughed at that one. The most popular hurricane survival plan, the locals told us, consisted of stockpiling snacks and beer and holing up in your house — drinking until you passed out or the whole thing passed over.
Another key selling point had been how modern, how first-world the Bahamas is. We could drink water right out of the tap, hook up to high-speed wireless Internet, watch CNN and make direct international calls.
What everyone failed to mention was that you couldn’t do all of that all of the time. Every day, something went out — the electricity, the satellite TV, the water, the phone, the wireless Internet service. Some days we hit the trifecta, and everything went out at the same time.
At first, all of this bothered us, but we soon found that everybody else took it in stride. They were already on Bahamas time, a kind of mañana concept that seems indigenous to tropical climates. If someone told us they’d come by to fix the air-conditioner tomorrow, we eventually figured out it might really mean in three days, or it might mean when hell freezes over.
This is a principle by which we’d happily learned to live while on vacation, but it was a little more annoying when applied to everyday life. Slowly, after it became apparent that nothing we did could hurry anything or anybody up, we adjusted. And we learned that timing was everything.
I would send e-mail before 9 a.m., when the Internet tended to go out for the rest of the day. Take a shower and run a load of laundry around 11 a.m., when the water was most likely to be working at full force. And in the late afternoon, when everything had only a 50-50 chance of working, we would go to the beach or the pool, drink a diet Coke, chill out.
One day in July, my sister got me on the phone.
“I’ve been trying to call you for three days,” she complained. “The phone never works.”
“Oh,” I told her.
“Isn’t it driving you crazy?” she asked.
I thought about it, for the first time in days. I felt like the lobster that didn’t bother to jump out of the pot as the water slowly heated to a boil: After a while, you just got used to it.
Things I wish I had understood before moving to the Bahamas, Part 2: If you see it, buy it.
We had been told to expect most things to cost twice as much as they did in the States (which they did, except when they cost three times as much). But we had also been told you could get everything you need.
That does not include everything you want — which is an important distinction.
In the little town of New Plymouth, on the other end of the island from our resort, there are three little groceries and two small hardware stores, plus a few boutiques that sell the sort of things you buy while on vacation but have no use for in everyday life (flowered silk sarongs, necklaces strung with tiny gold seashells, expensive hand-painted pottery). A supply boat loaded with groceries arrives once a week, on Thursday, so Friday is the best day for shopping, providing the best chance that the milk, bread and potato chips will not only be fresh, but that there will actually be some to buy.
For anything beyond the basics, however, we have to go to Marsh Harbour, a city of about 5,000 residents, the biggest in the entire Abacos chain of 100-plus islands. Here, there are three or four more groceries (the largest one the size of a small supermarket in the States), plus a couple of hardware stores, appliance shops, a few small boutiques and a couple of old-fashioned “dime stores,” where the merchandise looks as if it had been imported, dust and all, from the TG&Y store I shopped at in rural Missouri in 1975.
There was usually at least one of whatever we were looking for — vacuum cleaner, hair dryer, bath mat, infant bathtub — but only one. Buy it, or you would regret it later.
A trip to Marsh Harbour takes an entire day, what with the ferry and van rides, so our once-a-week trip turned into once every other week, then less than once a month. Also, our buy-it-while-you-can philosophy eventually resulted in a large stockpile of Herdez salsa, Tostitos restaurant-style chips and Stouffer’s French Bread pepperoni pizzas; I had to quit shopping because our kitchen was about the size of a closet.
Mostly, though, I quit shopping because there wasn’t anything I wanted to buy. I finally asked some of the resort employees where they shopped, figuring there must be some secret supply somewhere, some place only the locals were privy to.
There was.
Florida.
Things I wish I knew before moving to the Bahamas, Part 3: Always follow the rules. Except when you don’t have to.
A couple of weeks after our move, I took the baby and went to register our “new” golf cart. The cart was actually a ’94 model, had a top speed of 6 mph, and had neither a windshield nor brakes — none of which kept it from being deemed perfectly suitable to take on the island’s lone paved road.
“Do you have your insurance papers?” asked the registrar, who came over from a neighboring island once a week.
Um, not yet. Everybody had told me to get the license first. But no problem. I shifted the baby back onto my hip, then told the official I’d go buy insurance and would be back in a few minutes.
“Well, he wasn’t on the ferry this morning,” the registrar mentioned casually as I headed out the door. “Don’t think he’s coming this week.”
This was not good. If I couldn’t get insurance, I couldn’t get registered. And the cart, slow and unreliable as it was, was the only way I had to get around the island. The Bahamas, as a former British colony, has a reputation for handling official matters in a very proper and bureaucratic manner, so I started explaining my predicament to the official, who concentrated on rearranging his papers in a dingy metal box.
“You know you can’t drive it if you don’t have registration papers,” he said sternly. I looked at him helplessly. The baby, on cue, started whimpering. The official shuffled some more papers. “But, well, you know, probably nobody’s gonna say anything.”
And that is the way things go here. In some situations — work permits, residency papers — every letter of the long-winded laws must be obeyed. In others, nobody seems to care what you do.
When the insurance agent finally showed up a couple weeks later, he regarded me curiously when I came in to pay my $112 for a year’s worth of coverage. Only later, after we’d signed all the paperwork and the agent had moved on to a lively explanation of the Bahamian holiday of Junkanoo, did I find out why: Because the island was policed only by one part-time peace officer, it was highly unlikely anyone would ever ask to see proof of insurance, even in the even-more-unlikely event that I had a golf-cart accident.
Things I wish I knew before moving to the Bahamas, Part 4: We may have come for the beach and the sun and the rum punch, but that’s not what we’ll remember in the end.
One night a month after we’d arrived, I heard a faint knock. I had just put the baby to bed and I wasn’t expecting anybody; I barely knew anybody yet. I cracked the door. It was Ellie, one of Glenn’s cooks, a native of a little town on the next island. He was holding a big metal pot and smiling. I invited him in and he shyly slid through the door, eyes averted, holding the pot in front of him like a prize pie from the state fair.
“Ellie, did you cook me something? Did you make me some chicken souse?” I asked him.
He just smiled bigger. The day before, I had idly mentioned to Ellie that I wanted to try chicken souse, a traditional Bahamian chicken stew that once was commonly found at restaurants but now is usually served just at home. He told me it was easy — cut up a chicken, put in some carrots and potatoes, some onion, a little hot pepper, season it with lime juice. I told him I’d try making it myself one day.
Instead, here he was, the very next day, holding a pot of homemade chicken souse.
“I had some time this afternoon,” he said, brushing off my thanks. He wouldn’t even stay and eat; he had to get back to work, he said, though he waited to make sure I ladled a suitably big serving into my bowl.
This is the way things were on Green Turtle Cay, a small island where everyone knows not just everyone else’s name and business but their family lineage back to the Revolutionary War, when the first residents arrived on this island. We might not have had a place to buy a vacuum cleaner, and a box of Cheerios might have cost $8, but we could always count on a Bahamian for a smile, an unsolicited favor, or a little sip-sip (the local vernacular for friendly gossip).
Now that we live on yet another tropical island nation — the Dominican Republic, where we moved in November so my husband could take a better job at a bigger resort — I wish I could tell you that people like Ellie made up for the bugs and the mice and the sporadic supply of electricity. That we came to love the simple life. That a lovely beach and pretty sunsets can make up for the lack of a decent grocery store and the fact that the closest doctor was an island away.
But, seriously, the best I can say? It wasn’t so bad. Once we got used to it.
Note: By Patricia Rodriguez Terrell Special to the Star-Telegram